I Invited My Colleague to My Birthday Party. Things Went So Off the Rails That She Didn’t Show Up to Work for Three Days.

Advice It’s Slate’s 30th birthday! We’re looking back at decades of juicy advice about office drama. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Andrii Lysenko/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. To celebrate Slate’s 30th anniversary, we’ve been diving into the advice archives, sharing some of our juiciest letters on sex and relationships, and parenting. Today, gather round the water cooler with us to discuss: work drama! We’ve been doling out work advice since the days when email was a new concept—and we’ve gotten so many letters about bad bosses and bizarre co-workers over the years that in 2025, we launched a column called Good Job dedicated to them. One thing we’ve learned about work: Just because you’re paid to be there doesn’t mean you have to suffer through a bad situation … or that the gossip has to be boring. —Shannon Palus, features editor Dear Prudence, I recently had a birthday party—the first one in years thanks to the pandemic—and I wanted a BIG, wild celebration full of fun, raucous friends for my 33rd trip around the sun. As my birthday neared and the RSVPs started rolling in, I felt some kind of a “social contact high” from the excitement and anticipation. So much so that I randomly invited a work peer named “Stella.” Truthfully, I didn’t know Stella very well, but we’d exchange pleasantries here and there or quickly chat before monthly meetings, so we were familiar but not friendly to the point where we’d go out to a happy hour. After four years in consumer banking, we had never worked together directly and I wondered why we weren’t friends. Stella had an undeniable air of mysterious cool. I was thrilled that Stella and many other friends came out to celebrate. The drinks and the tiki bar vibe were strong. Some guy at the bar kept sending Stella shots, she kept downing them and avoiding him, as she has a live-in boyfriend. When it was time to leave, everyone spilled out into the street and had ciggies while goofing around, waiting for Ubers. I cannot state this enough—everyone was shitfaced, falling down drunk. After kicking some bushes, Stella ran around the corner. We all had a laugh, but a few moments later, Stella came back around the corner driving her car. We begged her not to drive and told her to get out. We told her we’d get her an Uber or call whoever she wanted, but Stella was in party mode and too busy “woo-ing” and honking. She refused to exit the car and sped off. Absolutely none of us were in a position to drive after her. The night wrapped up and then Stella didn’t show up to work on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. I’d learn from our boss that she’d been arrested for a DUI. I feel HORRIBLE. I feel like I didn’t do enough to prevent her from driving drunk and am incredibly relieved she didn’t injure herself or others. She hasn’t spoken to me or replied to any contact attempts. What is my responsibility here? I am absolutely racked with guilt and can’t stop thinking about Stella’s life imploding because of my birthday invite. I’m also afraid I’ll never be able to enjoy my birthday ever again! —Boozy Birthday Bummer Dear Boozy, I promise you that Stella’s life is not imploding because of your birthday invite. It’s imploding because she had a random bad night of too much alcohol and poor judgment or, more likely because she has a drinking problem. You are 33 years old and I assume she’s around the same age. I feel absolutely certain that this is not the first time she’s been in the presence of strong Tiki bar vibes or free shots. Plus, you did absolutely everything you could short of throwing your body in front of her car to help her. She hasn’t spoken to you because her life is falling apart and maybe because she’s embarrassed. It’s not because you were supposed to be in charge of her decision-making. Release the guilt and please, continue to enjoy your birthday parties knowing that any acquaintances who may show up are in charge of their own decisions. —Jenée Desmond-Harris From: Help! My Big Birthday Bash Ended With My Co-Worker’s Arrest. (March 22, 2023). Dear Prudence, I couldn’t wait to get e-mail at my office, because I hate returning phone calls. Now I find I hate returning e-mails. What do I do? And what’s the proper etiquette for an e-mail kiss-off? How long can I keep saying, “Oh, I didn’t get it. Can you resend?” —Anxious in Austin Dear Anxious, You have definitely identified a problem for the ‘90s. I don’t think an etiquette has yet been formulated for this problem, so here are two jerry-built options: 1) Ignore things you wish to ignore, or 2) fluff off troublesome e’s with a brief reply. Something like “in haste” or “gotta run, but I got your message.” And, dare Prudie say this in an online magazine? You can always say that your server screwed up … sort of the electronic version of “the dog ate my homework.” —Margo Howard From: E-mail Issues. (March 21, 1998). Dear Good Job, My Gen Z colleagues don’t seem to like me. I’m senior in tenure and in age, and in the middle in terms of authority. We’ve recently had a lot of turnover, and it has radically changed the vibe at work. I manage one of the larger teams, and we’re collectively responsible for all the company’s administrative functions. We’re the most stable team—we all get along great and have had little turnover, so I don’t think it’s me. But the other teams are full of new people whose primary mode of interaction with me is a flat affect tinted with contempt. Not all of our interactions are like this, but a significant enough number that I’m writing to you. They act like sullen teenagers. They refuse to ask questions or acknowledge information provided to them; they ignore requests for information and require many reminders to get basic personal administrative tasks done. They often don’t even return my greetings. From what I’ve observed, they’re a little nicer to the folks on my team, but there’s still a definite gap in the social dynamics. My team makes sure people have what they need to carry out the company’s work: equipment, processes, training on systems, etc. We also provide a ton of support in moving their priorities on demand, and we are very responsive. I only rarely have to play the heavy (which is within my authority) and tell them they can’t do/have what they want. I generally put a lot of effort into being pleasant, flexible, accessible, helpful, and kind. I think it comes down to disrespect for my function and possibly my age. They are mostly graduate degree holders working on highly specialized projects. I am the age of their parents, with only my decades of experience to stand on. They behave as if I am beneath them. Given my seniority, I don’t see myself going to their managers and saying, “Your market data analyst is being mean to me.” Also, assuming the manager takes action, it would be very obvious where the criticism is coming from and would almost certainly worsen the situation. So what’s to be done? Just internally roll my eyes at their surly attitudes? Lecture them? Go on strike for the worst of them? —Gen Xpert Dear Gen Xpert, Welcome to the Gen Z stare discourse. In case you missed it, TikTok recently popularized the idea that young people have a distinctive, sullen-seeming, flat-affect stare that older generations find rude. It’s unclear whether this is a real thing or just the ancient complaint that there’s something wrong with kids these days. (You probably remember how Baby Boomers used to claim that Gen X was lazy, apathetic, and lacked direction.) But your colleagues aren’t a generation, they’re people. And one of the great pleasures of working life is getting to know people of different ages. Some of the examples you mention suggest that your colleagues are overwhelmed rather than contemptuous. They might be overlooking or forgetting your requests in a sea of other urgent tasks they’re trying to complete. They might have come to expect reminders and have learned they can put off responding until the reminders get sufficiently urgent. They know they can count on you to make sure the tasks are completed on time. If it’s intentional, the behavior is still inconsiderate, but not personal. I suggest asking some of them how they prefer to communicate. Is email the best way to tell them about administrative tasks they need to complete? Should you put a reminder on their calendar, send a text, or stop by their workspace? You could try the same approach with their managers, who are probably closer to your age than theirs and might have found effective ways to manage their young new hires. These discussions imply that you’re not getting the information you need promptly, without sounding like you’re complaining that they’re being mean to you. Focus on understanding their processes so you can work well together, without bringing up real or perceived slights. The new people are still learning office etiquette, and you’re modeling it for them by being cheerful, responsive, and kind. Anyone in a new job can feel invisible, insecure about their performance, and confused by all the new acronyms, tasks, and deadlines. Let’s hope they develop some better social skills as they gain competence in their new jobs. For a more systematic fix, you could suggest a lunch-and-learn series of informal presentations where different departments explain what they do. If your department has a budget to have lunch delivered, great; if not, ask human resources or company leadership to support the series. Your new colleagues probably don’t understand how your team’s function works or why it’s important for everyone. And you might enjoy learning more about what the market data analysts are up to all day. —Laura Helmuth From: There’s Something Very Off About the Way My Younger Colleagues Speak to Me. I Can’t Take It Anymore. (August 14th, 2025). Dear Prudence, I work for a small business and am very close with my co-workers. We often spend time together outside of work. I’ve spent the last few months subtly flirting with a co-worker who is 20 years my senior, but I’ve never attempted anything further as he is in the middle of a divorce, although I am very close with his children. About a month ago, I was at his house while his family was away, and we established that we are attracted to one another. We decided to proceed with a “friends with benefits” situation since our relationship is complicated. We hooked up but did not have sex. At the end of that week, he told me that he preferred the sexual tension and “the thrill of the chase” to our new arrangement, although he did not want to ruin our friendship. I was not interested in that as I felt rejected. After a few days, I realized that I may have appeared too clingy and annoying—especially since a man in his 40s probably does not want his hookup texting him every day. I am never the clingy one, and it irritates me to think that I was. So I told him the following Monday that the chase was back on. Our flirtatious behavior has since become much more intense, while remaining discreet. It has now become almost a game in my head to have sex with him. I am not sure why. Should I make a move or bring this up with him? I would like to establish that relationship with him, but I am unsure if I ruined it by being too overbearing. Where do I go from here? —Uncertain Dear Uncertain, Oh, yikes. This letter started unraveling about two sentences in and I’m not quite sure where to start. Let’s start with the fact that your co-worker—a still-married man in his 40s—is apparently in the habit of inviting his twentysomething female colleagues over to his house while his children are away. Depending on your age, this may be one of your first full-time jobs, and it’s worth repeating that this is not normal office behavior, not even for an office that’s especially “close.” I don’t think you were annoying or clingy by texting this guy on a daily basis for a week. I think becoming friends-with-benefits with him was ill-advised and potentially bad for your career, but it’s not inappropriate to regularly text someone you’re hooking up with. I think he’s a creep and a bad employee (he can’t be getting much work done if he’s got this much time to play Dangerous Liaisons–level mind games) who took advantage of your youth and inexperience and is jerking you around. It would be a lousy move for him to pull even if he were a guy your age you met at a bar and started sleeping with casually; the fact that he did this while you two were supposed to be working together speaks volumes about his character and professional standards (or lack thereof). To answer your question, then: The best place for you to go from here is out of this weird, boundary-less, incestuous little office and into a sane workplace with a robust HR department. —Danny M. Lavery From: Colleagues With Benefits. (August 3rd, 2017). Dear Prudence, I’m incredibly proud of my career. I’ve worked hard for four decades and reached the upper echelons of my profession. My children and husband are proud of me, too, and my grandchildren see me as a role model. What none of them knows is that I got my first big promotion by sleeping with my boss some 40 years ago. I don’t think this diminishes what I’ve accomplished, but sometimes when my granddaughters question me about my early career, I wonder if I should be quite as pleased as I am. —Grandma’s Career Secret Dear Grandma’s Career Secret, You actually got something out of sleeping with the boss besides a pink slip and an STD! What happened with the boss happened in another world. Whatever profession you are in, it’s likely you were a female pioneer. Sure, you had a position (maybe many of them) under your boss that turned out to be professionally helpful. But so what? For four decades you have proved your bona fides. Lots of people get a hand up to start their professional lives. I doubt Rupert Murdoch feels what he’s done with his company is tainted by the fact that he inherited it from his father. So leave out the details about just how well you got along with the boss, and pass on to your granddaughters your hard-earned advice about having a brilliant career. —Emily Yoffe From: Sleeping on the Job. (April 14th, 2015). Hello Prudence, I have discovered that a 34-year-old co-worker believes in creationism. With all the evidence pointing toward evolution, how can this person accept it? The co-worker’s argument is that scientific evidence is not reliable because scientists usually change their position after new evidence is discovered. I have tried various arguments to convince this person but with no luck. How can I convince him/her otherwise? Thank you. —Darwin Dear Dar, How can you convince this person? You can’t, and you should stop feeling this is your job in life. Some people cannot be moved from some positions, and that’s just the way it is. All scientific advance is done in small increments. The evidence for natural selection as the guiding force for the evolution of species has been accrued over the past 100 years and is compelling. Your co-worker does not understand scientific method and may belong to a religious group that has creationism as part of its credo. Prudie suggests you dismiss the inclination to educate your office mate–and please don’t open up any discussions about the shape of the earth. —M.H. From: Coworker Conspiracy. (October 17th, 1998). Dear Good Job, My co-workers kind of hate me. I’ve been at my job for about a year, and mostly work alone—I work nights and my co-workers work days, so our shifts usually overlap by about two hours. I reported one of my co-workers (“Sally”) to human resources months ago for some seriously inappropriate things she said over the course of months, which surpassed what I could handle alone. This has gone over poorly with my co-workers, not just Sally, because they all think I should have just ignored Sally like they do, and they feel like I brought too much attention to the department. They don’t like the attention because they feel like it could lead to one of them being fired (they have also suggested I sometimes fake work in slower times so management doesn’t think we’re overstaffed… they are very worried about it). Since then, things have gotten icier. Now, they don’t speak to me unless absolutely required (I don’t even get replies to, “Hello” or “Have a nice weekend” and I have not gotten a single reply to any emails). It’s starting to feel like they’re escalating their dislike of me. Since no one talks to me, no one answers my emails, and I am intentionally kept out of regular conversations, I have started coming in to work with headphones on. It’s been great! However, they reported me to our manager for ignoring them and being passive-aggressive. I met with our manager who noted they all had a problem with the last person in my position too. We decided I would email my communications to my co-workers and copy my manager on them. I still haven’t gotten any replies, but at least now there’s a record of what I’ve said to counteract their untrustworthy narrative. Do I just keep coming in with headphones in and trust that my manager understands that I’m just there to do my job, not make my department devolve into an angry tornado? Or should I try anything else to calm the tension? —Night Shift Dear Night Shift, It must be such a relief when your two hours of overlap are over and you have the place to yourself, without co-workers scowling at you. The headphones were a fine idea, but since your co-workers complained and your boss shared their complaints with you, continuing to wear them might make your manager wonder if you’re part of the problem. Keep CCing your boss on emails-–it’s good practice to keep a paper trail when there are workplace problems because you never know how they could explode. Your department sounds like trouble (asking you to fake work? Yikes!), and if there are layoffs, it could be helpful to have documentation that you’ve been efficient and not part of the problem. You’re probably not going to win your co-workers over, especially if the Day Shift’s camaraderie is based in part on hating the Night Shift. But if you want to try, bring snacks. Seriously. It’s hard for people to resist snacks. Anybody who won’t eat a donut because you are the one who brought it is just hurting themselves. And it’ll be really hard for them to concentrate on work when they’re ignoring a dozen donuts out of spite. The ones whose affection or at least tolerance can be bought with a cookie will thank you, get a Pavlovian reward with a treat that they associate with you, and hopefully, defrost a bit. —L.H. From: I Reported My Colleague to HR. Somehow It Made Every Single Person at Work Turn on Me. (April 3rd, 2025). Dear Good Job, Earlier this year, my company called us all back to work “in person,” with no remote working anymore. Our supervisor had a “great idea” for us to get to know each other “in person”(even though many of us have been working together remotely for years). She made a rule that if two people are going to lunch together, they need to send a message to the team inviting everyone to join. Great idea on paper—you get to mingle and chat with coworkers you may not know well over lunch. But in reality, trying to get a table for 8-10 people, placing that many orders, then trying to carry on a conversation, and still finishing before your lunch hour was over was quite an effort. So I, along with a couple of other longtime employees, started to basically ignore her—we’d go out to lunch once each week without informing the whole group where we were going and at what time. Well, about four weeks ago, we got caught. Our supervisor came into a restaurant to eat alone and found four of us sitting at a table together. She came and stood by the table and said she hadn’t seen any emails about us meeting as a group at this particular place. I explained we are all longtime employees and this gives us a chance to just to talk with our little group about our families and other things. Her response was how were the other coworkers going to learn about your families if you don’t invite them out to lunch with you? I was later reprimanded at work for “not following work policies” (I guess because I was the one that spoke back to her). So we came up with a different plan. Now on the days we plan on eating out, we take our lunch at 10:30 a.m., right when a couple of our favorite places open for lunch. We send out the invitation messages like we’re supposed to, but of course nobody else really wants to eat lunch that early, and so it’s been just our group eating. Well, I got called into the supervisor’s office and was told that I was “violating the intent of the lunch policy.” Now, she said, we could only take our lunch between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. and would be written up for not following her policies. I told her to go ahead as our employee handbook states we get two 15-minute paid breaks and an hour of unpaid lunch with no specific times stated. She said it was “implied” that lunch would be over the normal lunch hour and would follow through on her threat of a write up for all of us if we did it again. Is she nuts? I talk to the other workers during our 15-minute breaks so it not like I haven’t met or socialized with these other people, I just want to have a quiet, relaxed lunch with my close work friends. —Lunch Lady Dear Lunch Lady, In the spirit of the Am I the Asshole subreddit, I’m going to give this letter a gentle ESH—that is, “Everyone Sucks Here.” As someone who worked at a magazine that rhymes with Strolling Zone where the same little cliques of people went out to lunch every day and never invited the rest of us, I am sympathetic to your manager’s (ultimately misguided, but I’ll get to that in a bit) efforts to encourage socializing with others in the office. A lot of important team-building and information-sharing (what some of us like to call “office gossip”) happens in these informal gatherings like lunches and after-work drinks, and the people who are excluded are often at a disadvantage. At the same time, I am also sympathetic to people like you, who just want to take their precious lunch hour on their own terms with people they like, and not have to worry about accommodating the others in the office around whom they may not be as comfortable. It’s your free time and you should be able to spend it as you see fit. So I also think that mandating that every lunch hour should be open to all is a little ridiculous. I wonder if you could propose a compromise. Maybe there could be a team lunch once a week (on the company’s dime? Hey, a girl can dream), but people can decide what they want to do the other four days of the week. Also, I know you have your little crew at work, but once in awhile it might be nice for you to reach out to someone else you work with and ask them to have lunch. You never know who might end up being a friend, or even just a decent lunch companion. —Doree Shafrir From: My Boss Has a New Lunch Rule. It Would Make Sense in a Middle School—Not a Professional Office. (August 5th, 2025). Dear Prudence, Is there a polite way to suggest to one’s coworkers that they use less toilet paper and paper towels, and make sure that they actually turn the bathroom faucet all the way off after washing their hands? I don’t want to be annoying, but only three people use this bathroom. Yet at least once a day, I find the toilet paper roll has to be changed. We’re talking the fluffy, quilted kind. You only need a few sheets. The trash can is overflowing with barely used paper towels, and the faucet is slightly running. Not to mention that I can’t seem to get through to anyone that the empty cardboard rolls from TP and paper towels are recyclable. Should I just vent silently, or come up with some polite way of mentioning this stuff? Maybe I should post some anonymous sticky notes, such as “please make sure faucet is all the way off,” or a picture of those cute cartoon bears that urge less toilet paper waste? —Tree Hugger in Distress Dear Tree Hugger, Your office has the fluffy quilted kind of toilet paper—do you guys need a full-time advice columnist? Fortunately for your ecological consciousness, there are only three of you. So no matter how profligate the bathroom habits of your colleagues are, it is going to make no difference to the world’s output of waste. Yes, you could rescue those inner toilet paper cardboard tubes. You could even build a sculpture on your desk that admonishes people not to waste toilet paper. But then you’d probably end up looking for new work, and who knows what the bathroom habits of your new colleagues would be? It’s fine if you put a sticky note on the bathroom mirror saying, “Please make sure the faucet is turned off all the way. It is not fine to put up a sticky note saying “limit yourself to four squares of fluffy quilted.” If you do that, you’re going to end up pointing the finger right at yourself —E.Y. From: Office Toilet Paper Drama. (May 20th, 2015). Advice Sex Workplace